At the head of a force armed solely with bows and arrows, Jimmy Stevens overcame the local administrators and declared the island a sovereign state. In line with years of colonial rivalry, the French recognized Vemerana, but the British did not. They prepared to send troops instead, until France objected. Meanwhile Mr Stevens concentrated on his libertarian principles. He had twenty-five wives.
But the rest of the Anglo-French archipelago soon became independent as the colonials had intended. Named Vanuatu, this new state was recognized by many more countries besides France. Vanuatu asked for assistance in the Mr Stevens affair from next-door Papua New Guinea, who readily agreed. When Papuan soldiers landed they confiscated wagonloads of bows and arrows and Vemerana’s secession was soon over. Jimmy Stevens was arrested, tried and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. With his downfall came the end of Mr Oliver’s attempts at nation-building. His dream of creating an autonomous laissez-faire utopia reverted to just that.
HUTT RIVER
Seceded from Australia in 1970 in protest against newly introduced grain quotas.
On 27 May 1976, a cablegram was sent by the Australian department of foreign affairs in Canberra to the prime minister. Marked ‘Restricted’, its subject was Hutt River Province:
OUR LEGAL ADVICE IS THAT THE INFORMATION AND EVIDENCE AVAILABLE TO DATE DOES NOT SUGGEST THAT CASLEY HAS CONTRAVENED ANY AUSTRALIAN LAW. HOWEVER, CASLEY’S ACTIVITIES TO OBTAIN RECOGNITION FOR HIMSELF AS ‘PRINCE LEONARD’ AND FOR ‘HUTT RIVER PROVINCE’ AS SOVEREIGN HAVE BEEN EXAMINED CAREFULLY AND, WHERE APPROPRIATE, ADMINISTRATIVE ACTION TAKEN TO COUNTER THEM BY THE COMMONWEALTH AND WESTERN AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENTS.
Picture gentle, rolling terrain just 30 kilometres inland from the Indian Ocean, on the western edge of the huge Australian landmass. Fields of snow-white and sky-blue lupins, grown as a high-protein food for livestock, stretch to the horizon. The year is 1970 and farmer Leonard George Casley, his wife Shirley and seven children are alone in a kingdom of their own making. After many attempts to reverse a strict new quota on their production of wheat, Casley has taken the ultimate decision: to split from Australia altogether.
Over the years, Hutt River Principality has had many spats with its larger neighbour. The Australian postal service refuses to handle outgoing Hutt River mail, forcing it to be diverted via Canada. Following repeated tax demands, Mr Casley officially declares war on Australia but is ignored. He declares a cessation of hostilities within the week. Hutt River is not recognized but gains an acceptance of sorts. In their Notices of Assessment from the Australian government’s taxation office for 2005, Leonard and Shirley are deemed to be non-residents of Australia. Neither has anything to pay. A reproduction of Prince Leonard’s tax return is mounted on the wall outside the Nain post office for all to see. It is one of Hutt River’s prized landmarks.
ATLANTIUM
A primarily non-territorial state – albeit based in Australia – founded in 1981.
This is a state, but not as you know it. In a leafy suburb of Sydney, Australia, a self-declared sovereign entity sets out to challenge conventional notions of what makes a country a country. The idea that a nation-state be determined by its geographical boundaries is running out of steam. In the Empire of Atlantium they believe that territorial claims as the basis for legitimate statehood are all but meaningless in the modern globalized world.
A state is made up of people, and people move – today more than ever before. A community of citizens – wherever they happen to be distributed geographically – forms the primary legitimacy of Atlantium. Its sovereignty is founded upon the will of its people. This is an extraterritorial, transnational, intercultural state.
Within months of its proclamation in November 1981, the original inhabitants of Atlantium had drawn up a constitution. They decreed a new calendar, which begins at the end of the last Ice Age. Latin became one of its official languages because today it is a tongue that has little association with any living culture. Stamps, coins and banknotes also appeared, the currency featuring images of the Imperial Eagle and Atlantium’s head of state, Emperor George II (born George Cruickshank in Sydney, Australia).
From its beginnings in a Sydney apartment, Atlantium moved to occupy a rural province with a fenced perimeter. This is the empire’s global administrative capital, ceremonial focal point and spiritual homeland. A territory for a non-territorial state. Like Rome, the province occupies seven hills. The rolling countryside is occupied by more kangaroos than humans.
Unlike most other countries, the Empire of Atlantium does not issue passports. It advocates the unrestricted international freedom of movement for all peoples and therefore neither issues nor recognizes any form of restrictive travel documentation. Citizens of Atlantium are true citizens of the world.
ANTARCTICA
The ‘last continent’ where disputes over territorial sovereignty are uniquely set aside.
This is a land of extremes, harsh, remote and unforgiving. A land of active volcanoes and spectacular mountain ranges but almost entirely wreathed in ice. The coldest, windiest and driest continent; one with no trees or bushes, just lichen and moss. No indigenous population; no permanent human population at all. The first woman to arrive was in 1935; the first child born not until 1979. A frozen wilderness, larger than Europe, inhabited mainly by penguins.
All of which helps to explain why it also differs politically. Under normal circumstances, this territory would have been carved up long ago. It began like that, in the early twentieth century, when imperialism was still a rampant force. They helped themselves to slices, like a frozen dessert. Until they stopped. Some wedges of the Antarctic cake remained unclaimed by any country, but several states had made claims and some of those claims overlapped. By the middle of the twentieth century, these territorial positions had been asserted, but not agreed. Tensions arose, until cooperation prevailed, and an international treaty was signed in 1959.
Some countries continue to explicitly recognize the territorial claims, some maintain a policy of not recognizing any claims, and some reserve the right to make their own claim. Meanwhile, the goal of sovereignty is on hold. The Antarctic transcends the norms of the nation state, an ice-bound challenge to the global standard for territorial control. This is the exception that proves the rule. The entire continent is used exclusively for peaceful purposes, the preserve solely of scientists and adventure tourists. All thanks to the Antarctic Treaty, a unique agreement to govern a unique place.
UNITED MICRONATIONS MULTI-OCEANIC ARCHIPELAGO (UMMOA)
A multi-oceanic archipelago – twenty-nine insular possessions and one Antarctic continental territory – leading to territorial disputes with Bangladesh, Belize, Colombia, Comoros, France, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Kiribati, Madagascar, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Portugal, Seychelles and the USA.
The initial island members of UMMOA were grouped together for statistical convenience only, assembled by the International Organization for Standardization for bureaucratic reasons. A ragtag collection of uninhabited atolls, islets and reefs spread across a vast area of the Pacific Ocean, they had little in common other than being under the sovereignty of the USA. This union was officially assigned a two-letter code, or alpha-2 as they call it: UM. A disparate quirk of political geography, they were otherwise known as the United States Minor Outlying Islands.
These isles were promptly invaded in a virtual fashion, collectively given an internet country code, ‘.um’, in line with their alpha-2; but this internet country code was abandoned because the domain was not used. Like a seaworthy ship discarded in international waters, the abandoned code was legally occupied in May 2008 and the United States Minor Outlying Islands annexed. They were renamed the United Micronations Multi-Oceanic Archipelago. UMMOA for short. UMMOA has grown and diversified. Its capital, the city of Cyberterra, was founded as a metrosite or virtual realm, given terrestrial coordinates of 43° 0’ 0” North, 15° 0’ 0” East, a point in the Adriatic Sea. The multi-oceanic archip
elago went continental, laying claim to a slice of Antarctica. It asserted its mandate over a piece of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and several islets threatened by rising sea-levels in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
As some territory disappears, elsewhere new land emerges. Deep beneath the gentle waves of the Red Sea, tectonic rumblings began late in 2011. Fishermen from the port of Salif in Yemen spied a fountain of blood-red lava spurting 30 metres into the air, and a new island was duly formed in the Zubair archipelago. UMMOA named it and claimed it; Aphrodite Island became UMMOA’s most recent national component.
ELGALAND-VARGALAND
Proclaimed in 1992, incorporating all boundaries between other nations as well as digital territory and other states of existence, such as the dream state.
One day two artists, Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren, met in Stockholm, Sweden and agreed to establish a new country. They had no army to back up their territorial ambitions, but they had identified spaces where they could establish their state without ruffing too many feathers.
They began with fragments of land. Like the forgotten scraps of food left on your plate after a meal, these slivers left over between countries can be called No Man’s Land no longer: Von Hausswolff and Elggren have annexed them as part of Elgaland-Vargaland.
Like any empire, this country is in flux. New territories appear overnight, as along the border between Sudan and South Sudan, annexed as soon as South Sudan declared independence in 2011. Elsewhere, such unclaimed terrain disappears as when the border between East and West Germany dissolved. Visitors to Elgaland-Vargaland are numbered in their millions every year. Each time you travel somewhere you visit Elgaland-Vargaland. On the kingdom’s tenth anniversary in 2002, a group of citizens boarded the ferry from Stockholm to Tallinn, Estonia. They carried only their Elgaland-Vargaland passports. The Estonian authorities held them for a day for trying to enter the country with false documents before they were sent back to Sweden. Their purpose was to go home to Elgaland-Vargaland, to be in turn rejected at the Swedish border, then returned to Estonia and so on, for ever. Their passports were confiscated before their return to Sweden, so they visited home for only one day.
However, the country comprises more than simply physical space, incorporating digital territory and other states of existence entirely. When the Roman Catholic Church effectively buried the concept of limbo – the place where babies who died without baptism went – it too was annexed. Each time you enter another form, such as the daydream state, you become another visitor to Elgaland-Vargaland.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank a number of colleagues at Oxford University’s School of Geography and the Environment whose assistance with, and thoughts on, this project are much appreciated. They are Simon Abele, Henri Rueff, Tim Schwanen and Fiona McConnell. My agent, Gordon Wise, worked hard to see this book into fruition, as did Jon Butler, publisher and editor, who had faith and enthusiasm as well as an eagle eye. I am particularly grateful to Sarah Greeno for her hard work and attention to detail in producing the maps and designing the book. Finally, my thanks also go to Lorraine Desai and Mia Middleton for tolerating the long evenings I was locked away in my office.
NICK MIDDLETON
Nick Middleton is a geographer, writer and presenter of television documentaries. He teaches at Oxford University, where he is a Fellow of St Anne’s College. A Royal Geographical Society award-winning author, he works, teaches and communicates on a wide variety of geographical, travel and environmental issues for a broad range of audiences, from policy makers to primary-school children. He is the author of seven travel books, including the bestseller GOING TO EXTREMES, which accompanied a television series he wrote and presented for Channel 4 on extreme environments and the people who live in them.
First published 2015 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2015 by Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1-4472-9529-7
Copyright © Nick Middleton 2015
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Map artwork by Sarah Greeno
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An Atlas of Countries That Don't Exist Page 7
